Age Differences in the Association Between Cardiovascular Disease, Depression, and Suicide Risk

Abstract Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is prevalent among older adults aged 60+ (75%). The literature shows a strong bidirectional association between risk for CVD and risk for depression, although there is limited research regarding whether the strength of this association differs by age. CVD may also be related to suicide risk; however, the literature is both limited and mixed, with studies inconsistently finding an association. Additionally, no known studies have investigated age differences in this relationship. The present study examined the association between CVD (assessed via diagnostic checklist), depression (PHQ-8), and suicide risk (SBQ-R), as well as whether these associations differed by age. The current sample consisted of 301 younger adults (aged 18-40) and 432 older adults (aged 60+) recruited online through Mechanical Turk (younger adults: 78.1% white, 46.5% female; older adults 91.4% white, 56.3% female). Older adults had more CVD diagnoses (M=0.9) than younger adults (M=0.3). The association between CVD (i.e., 1+ CVD diagnoses vs. 0 diagnoses) and mental health was moderated by age (depression interaction p<.001; suicide risk interaction p=.033). Among younger adults, presence of CVD diagnosis was associated with 85% higher depression symptoms (M=6.1 vs 11.3) and 48% higher suicide risk scores (M=5.8 vs 8.6) when compared to no diagnoses. CVD had less of a negative impact among older adults and was associated with 64% higher depression symptoms (M=3.1 vs 5.1) and only 14% higher suicide risk scores (M=4.3 vs 4.9). Providers treating CVD may consider assessing and addressing depression and suicide risk, especially among younger patients with CVD.

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Relation Between Depression Symptoms and Suicide Risk in Adults and Older Adults: A Brief Report

Journal of Applied Gerontology ◽

10.1177/0733464820970849 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 073346482097084

Author(s):

Ruifeng Cui ◽

Amy Fiske

Keyword(s):

Risk Factors ◽

Older Adults ◽

Suicide Risk ◽

Somatic Symptoms ◽

The United States ◽

Community Dwelling ◽

Self Report ◽

Depression Symptoms ◽

Younger Adults ◽

Risk Factors For Suicide

Depression symptoms are key risk factors for suicide; however, older adults differ from younger adults in types of depression symptoms experienced and thus their risk factors for suicide. The present brief report investigated relations between different symptoms of depression and suicide risk and whether these relations are moderated by age. Participants were 944 community-dwelling adults ( N = 512, M = 39) and older adults ( N = 432, M = 66) from the United States recruited through Mechanical Turk. Participants completed self-report measures on depression symptoms and suicide risk. Age was found to moderate the relation between cognitive-affective and somatic symptoms and suicide risk. Younger age exacerbated the negative effects of these symptoms on suicide risk. The study is the first to investigate whether older adults differed from younger adults in the association between types of depression symptoms and suicide risk and found that the risk posed by cognitive-affective and somatic symptoms was greater for younger adults.

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Age Differences in the Association Between Anxiety Symptoms and Suicide Risk

Innovation in Aging ◽

10.1093/geroni/igab046.2014 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 5 (Supplement_1) ◽

pp. 526-526

Author(s):

Ruifeng Cui ◽

Amy Fiske ◽

Montgomery Owsiany

Keyword(s):

Older Adults ◽

Suicide Risk ◽

Anxiety Symptoms ◽

Depression Symptoms ◽

Younger Adults ◽

General Anxiety Disorder ◽

General Anxiety ◽

Patient Health ◽

And Behavior ◽

Suicide Behaviors

Abstract Suicide rates increase over the life-span, necessitating concern in older adults. Recent studies suggest that anxiety disorders are associated with suicidal thoughts and behavior. The present study examined the association between anxiety symptoms (General Anxiety Disorder-7) and suicide risk (Suicide Behaviors Questionnaire-Revised), testing whether the association differs between younger and older adults. Depression symptoms (Patient Health Questionnaire-8) were controlled for in the analyses. In a sample of 944 participants (46% 60+ years), anxiety symptoms, depression symptoms, and suicide risk were lower among older adults (60+ years) than younger adults (all p < .01). Age moderated the significant association between anxiety symptoms and suicide risk (ΔR2 = .008, p < .01). Results indicate that an increase in anxiety is associated with a smaller increase in suicide risk for older adults than younger adults. The need for suicide risk screening among individuals with elevated anxiety symptoms is critical, especially for younger adults.

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Video Games and Emotion Regulation

GeroPsych ◽

10.1024/1662-9647/a000196 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 31 (4) ◽

pp. 205-213 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Kathryn L. Ossenfort ◽

Derek M. Isaacowitz

Keyword(s):

Older Adults ◽

Emotion Regulation ◽

Video Games ◽

Age Differences ◽

Interactive Media ◽

Age Groups ◽

Younger Adults ◽

Media Usage ◽

The Everyday ◽

Media Preferences

Abstract. Research on age differences in media usage has shown that older adults are more likely than younger adults to select positive emotional content. Research on emotional aging has examined whether older adults also seek out positivity in the everyday situations they choose, resulting so far in mixed results. We investigated the emotional choices of different age groups using video games as a more interactive type of affect-laden stimuli. Participants made multiple selections from a group of positive and negative games. Results showed that older adults selected the more positive games, but also reported feeling worse after playing them. Results supplement the literature on positivity in situation selection as well as on older adults’ interactive media preferences.

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Age Differences in Executive Control Assessed with a Robotic Object Hit and Avoid Test of Rapid Motor Decision Making

Innovation in Aging ◽

10.1093/geroni/igaa057.3255 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 4 (Supplement_1) ◽

pp. 881-882

Author(s):

Alexandra Watral ◽

Kevin Trewartha

Keyword(s):

Older Adults ◽

Decision Making ◽

Executive Functioning ◽

Age Differences ◽

Executive Control ◽

Test Performance ◽

Cognitive Status ◽

Younger Adults ◽

Neuropsychological Tasks ◽

Measures Of Performance

Abstract Motor decision-making processes are required for many standard neuropsychological tasks, including the Trail Making Test (TMT), that aim to assess cognitive functioning in older adults. However, in their standard formats, it is difficult to isolate the relative contributions of sensorimotor and cognitive processes to performance on these neuropsychological tasks. Recently developed clinical tasks use a robotic manipulandum to assess both motor and cognitive aspects of rapid motor decision making in an object hit (OH) and object hit and avoid (OHA) task. We administered the OH and OHA tasks to 77 healthy younger adults and 59 healthy older adults to assess age differences in the motor and cognitive measures of performance. We administered the TMT parts A and B to assess the extent to which OHA performance is associated with executive functioning in particular. The results indicate that after controlling for hand speed, older adults performed worse on the OH and OHA tasks than younger adults, performance declines were far greater in the OHA task, and the global performance measures, which have been associated with cognitive status, were more sensitive to age differences than motor measures of performance. Those global measures of performance were also associated with measures of executive functioning on the TMT task. These findings provide evidence that rapid motor decision making tasks are sensitive to declines in executive control in aging. They also provide a way to isolate cognitive declines from declines in sensorimotor processes that are likely a contributing factor to age differences in neuropsychological test performance.

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AGE DIFFERENCES IN POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT: ROLE OF SELF-RELEVANCE

Innovation in Aging ◽

10.1093/geroni/igz038.2889 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 3 (Supplement_1) ◽

pp. S785-S785

Author(s):

Tze Kiu Wong ◽

Helene H Fung

Keyword(s):

Older Adults ◽

Collective Action ◽

Older People ◽

Age Differences ◽

Political Behavior ◽

Social Issues ◽

Political Engagement ◽

Political Discussion ◽

Younger Adults

Abstract Previous studies usually found that older people are less politically engaged than younger adults, especially when considering political behavior other than voting. The current study extends the Selective Engagement hypothesis (Hess, 2014) to political engagement. 81 younger adults and 79 older adults rated 8 issues on self-relevance and their willingness to engage in political discussion, arguments and collective action on each issue. The predicted moderating effect of self-relevance was not found, but older people indeed are more willing to discuss (B = 0.07, p = 0.027) and argue with others on more self-relevant issues (B = 0.06, p = 0.031). Perceived cost of collective action was found to be a moderator, such that self-relevance was less important than other factors for high-cost actions (B = -0.016, p = 0.013). The current research sheds light on potential ways to increase older adults’ engagement in social issues.

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Age Differences in the Social Associative Learning of Trust Information

10.31234/osf.io/b38rd ◽

2022 ◽

Author(s):

Kendra Leigh Seaman ◽

Alexander P. Christensen ◽

Katherine Senn ◽

Jessica Cooper ◽

Brittany Shane Cassidy

Keyword(s):

Older Adults ◽

Age Differences ◽

Social Cues ◽

Trust Game ◽

Time Model ◽

Younger Adults ◽

Cortical Areas ◽

Age Related ◽

The Social ◽

Over Time

Trust is a key component of social interaction. Older adults, however, often exhibit excessive trust relative to younger adults. One explanation is that older adults may learn to trust differently than younger adults. Here, we examine how younger (N=33) and older adults (N=30) learn to trust over time. Participants completed a classic iterative trust game with three partners. Younger and older adults shared similar amounts but differed in how they shared money. Compared to younger adults, older adults invested more with untrustworthy partners and less with trustworthy partners. As a group, older adults displayed less learning than younger adults. However, computational modeling shows that this is because older adults are more likely to forget what they have learned over time. Model-based fMRI analyses revealed several age-related differences in neural processing. Younger adults showed prediction error signals in social processing areas while older adults showed over-recruitment of several cortical areas. Collectively, these findings suggest that older adults attend to and learn from social cues differently from younger adults.

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Age differences in the precision of memory at short and long delays

10.31234/osf.io/zucr3 ◽

2019 ◽

Author(s):

Stephen Rhodes ◽

Emily E Abenne ◽

Ashley M Meierhofer ◽

Moshe Naveh-Benjamin

Keyword(s):

Older Adults ◽

Age Differences ◽

Long Term Memory ◽

Age Difference ◽

Younger Adults ◽

Recall Error ◽

Successful Recall ◽

Error Distance

Age differences are well established for many memory tasks assessing both short-term and long-term memory. However, how age differences in performance vary with increasing delay between study and test is less clear. Here we report two experiments in which participants studied a continuous sequence of object-location pairings. Test events were intermixed such that participants were asked to recall the precise location of an object following a variable delay. Older adults exhibit a greater degree of error (distance between studied and recalled locations) relative to younger adults at short (0-2 intervening events) and longer delays (10-25 intervening events). Mixture modeling of the distribution of recall error suggests that older adults do not fail to recall information at a significantly higher rate than younger adults. Instead, what they do recall appears to be less precise. Follow up analyses demonstrate that this age difference emerges following only one or two intervening events between study and test. These findings are consistent with the suggestion that aging does not greatly impair recall from the focus of attention but age differences emerge once information is displaced from this highly accessible state. Further, we suggest that age differences in the precision of memory, but not the probability of successful recall, may be due to the use of more gist-like representations in this task.

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Adult age differences in subjective responses to dynamic socioemotional incentives

10.31234/osf.io/4u3kc ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Sade J Abiodun ◽

Galen McAllister ◽

Gregory Russell Samanez-Larkin ◽

Kendra Leigh Seaman

Keyword(s):

Older Adults ◽

Age Differences ◽

Emotional Valence ◽

Incentive Motivation ◽

Social Signals ◽

Younger Adults ◽

Positivity Effect ◽

Adult Age ◽

Age Related ◽

Adult Age Differences

Facial expressions are powerful communicative social signals that motivate feelings and action in the observer. However, research on incentive motivation has overwhelmingly focused on money and points and the limited research on social incentives has been mostly focused on responses in young adulthood. Previous research on the age-related positivity effect and adult age differences in social motivation suggest that older adults might experience higher levels of positive arousal to socioemotional stimuli than younger adults. Affect ratings following dynamic emotional expressions (anger, happiness, sadness) varying in magnitude of expression showed that higher magnitude expressions elicited higher arousal and valence ratings. Older adults did not differ significantly in levels of arousal when compared to younger adults, however their ratings of emotional valence were significantly higher as the magnitude of expressions increased. The findings provide novel evidence that socioemotional incentives may be relatively more reinforcing as adults age. More generally, these dynamic socioemotional stimuli that vary in magnitude are ideal for future studies of more naturalistic affect elicitation, studies of social incentive processing, and use in incentive-driven choice tasks.

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Age differences in moral judgment: Older adults are more deontological than younger adults

Journal of Behavioral Decision Making ◽

10.1002/bdm.2086 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 32 (1) ◽

pp. 47-60 ◽

Cited By ~ 8

Author(s):

Simon McNair ◽

Yasmina Okan ◽

Constantinos Hadjichristidis ◽

Wändi Bruine de Bruin

Keyword(s):

Older Adults ◽

Moral Judgment ◽

Age Differences ◽

Younger Adults

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EXPLORING AGE, GENDER, AND RELATIONSHIP CLOSENESS DIFFERENCES IN RESPONSES TO IGNORED DISRESPECT

Innovation in Aging ◽

10.1093/geroni/igz038.1118 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 3 (Supplement_1) ◽

pp. S305-S305

Author(s):

Jenessa C Steele ◽

Amanda Chappell ◽

Rachel Scott

Keyword(s):

Older Adults ◽

Young Adults ◽

Age Differences ◽

Negative Emotions ◽

Age Groups ◽

Emotional Responses ◽

Younger Adults ◽

Relationship Closeness ◽

Close Condition

Abstract Emotional responses to disrespect tend to be negative (Hawkins, 2015). Little is known about how responses to disrespect vary across age groups and relationship closeness. It is unknown whether older adults have more emotional protection against disrespectful experiences, or are more deeply affected due to relationship closeness. Overall, we might expect that older adults react less negatively to disrespect compared to young adults, as they are more-skilled emotion regulators (Carstensen, 1991; English & Carstensen, 2014). We aimed to explore if, and under which circumstances, older adults are more or less sensitive to disrespect compared to younger adults. Three hundred participants responded to six scenarios illustrating ignored disrespect. Participants were randomly assigned to close or distant relationship disrespect scenarios. Relationship closeness was first determined by requesting participants identify a person in each layer of Kahn and Antonucci’s (1980) Social Convoy Model. Identified names were then automatically inserted into the six scenarios. Emotional responses and sensitivity to each scenario were recorded. Participants in the close condition reported more sensitivity to disrespect and negative emotions than participants in the distant condition. Females reported more sensitivity to disrespect and negative emotions than males. We did not find overwhelming support for age differences in responses to disrespect. A single scenario indicated younger participants more sensitive to disrespect than older participants. Findings suggest it is more hurtful to be disrespected by someone close to you and females may be more sensitive to disrespect than males. More research investigating the role of age in disrespect is needed.

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